They won’t fully confirm until the imaging and follow-ups, but they’re talking surgery tones. Recovery timelines. Words like significant and unfortunate and we’ll do everything we can.
I stare at the wall while they talk.
My leg throbs under the blanket.
My hands won’t stop shaking.
Season.
The word keeps trying to form in my head and failing.
My season.
Gone.
Maybe.
And through all of it, Tristan stays.
He gets me ice chips when my mouth goes dry.
Signs something when they need a student emergency contact and I’m too dazed to process which form needs what.
Texts Coach from my phone because my fingers won’t work right.
Calls my mother because someone has to and I cannot survive that conversation without witnesses.
He stays through all of it.
Not looking at his watch.
Not checking his ego.
Not remembering he is Tristan Vale and has his own life and his own body and his own obligations waiting for him.
Just there.
Solid.
By the time they finally leave us alone in a little curtained room with too-thin blankets and a monitor humming softly beside me, it’s after midnight and the adrenaline crash has turned everything slow.
Tristan is sitting in the plastic chair by my bed with his elbows on his knees, looking wrecked in the fluorescent light.
I watch him for a minute.
The lock of hair has fallen across his forehead again.
He hasn’t noticed.
His hands are clasped so tightly together the knuckles look pale.
He feels me looking.
Lifts his head.
And the expression that crosses his face when our eyes meet is enough to make me forget every warning Drew threw at me like shrapnel.
“Hey,” he says quietly.
